A Moment for A good Laugh

[First published September 27, 2005] One can’t be serous all the time. I love a good laugh and the following are hard to beat. They came from annual “Dark and Stormy Night” competition — actual analogies and metaphors by way of Scripta Word Services (here). Found in high school essays:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances likeunderpants in a dryer without ClingFree.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guywho went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of thoseboxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at highschools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of thoseboxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he wasroom-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes justbefore it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because ofhis wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerlysurcharge-free ATM.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowlingball wouldn’t.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie,surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardycomes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you frythem in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across thegrassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having leftCleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 pm. at a speed of 35 mph.